David Cameron gives the Queen tour of Chequers | Daily Mail Online comments For the first time in almost two decades, the Queen visited Chequers yesterday. But if she was excited to be back, she hid it rather well behind her solemn expression. It was only the third visit the monarch has made to the Prime Minister’s country retreat, and her first since she accompanied Sir John Major in 1996. David Cameron – who is given a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace – arranged the trip so that he could ‘host her for a change’, No10 said. The Queen was shown a wall of photographs of former Prime Ministers at the Buckinghamshire country residence Prince Philip also took an interest in the photographs, before heading outside to plant a tree Mr Cameron said he was 'delighted' to invite them to the Prime Minister’s country retreat after unearthing old photographs of a 1970 visit by US President Richard Nixon. After a tour of the house, the rare occasion was marked by the Duke of Edinburgh planting an oak tree in the grounds. RELATED ARTICLES Share Prime Ministers regularly use Chequers to host allies, world leaders and celebrities.

But the Queen has not been to the grace-and-favour home near Ellesborough in Buckinghamshire for 18 years, and has only ever been invited by Tory Prime Minister. There were no trips under Gordon Brown, Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher. The Queen last paid a visit when Sir John Major was prime minister in 1996. After today's lunch Mr Cameron wrote on Twitter: 'Delighted to host Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for lunch at Chequers today.' Tour: David Cameron showed the Queen around Chequers after lunch, with his wife Samantha looking on It was the first time the Queen has been to the Prime Minister's country retreat since 1996 A LUNCH MENU FIT FOR A QUEEN Starter Bread and butter pudding with icecream Cheese and biscuit A Downing Street spokesman said: ‘The last time the Queen visited Chequers in 1996 she planted an oak tree in the grounds and the Prime Minister thought this would be a nice thing to do on this occasion.’ The menu for today’s lunch included Scottish smoked salmon for starter, a main course of lamb with potato and vegetables and bread and butter pudding and icecream for dessert, followed by cheese and biscuits.

According to chef Alan Lavender, who worked at Chequers from 1986 until 2010, Sir John served the Queen warm marinated salmon before presenting her with a jar of home-made Chequers chutney. Her first visit was in October 1970 when she joined the then-PM Edward Heath and US president Richard Nixon. She was photographed outside the red bricked Tudor mansion with the PM, Nixon and his wife Pat. ‘The PM and the Queen see each other regularly and the Queen hosts the PM at the palace once a week,’ the Downing Street spokesman added.

‘The PM thought this would be a good opportunity to have lunch with him, to host her for a change when he had been at Chequers he found some old photos of previous visits by the Queen including a visit with President Nixon in 1970 and thought it would be nice to host her again.’ The Duke of Edinburgh planted an oak tree in the grounds, after the Queen did the same in 1996 Mr Cameron decided to invite the Royals for lunch after unearthing photographs of an earlier visit with Richard Nixon Before leaving Chequers, the Queen signed a visitors' book, with the Prime Minister and Duke of Edinburgh looking on At the time of the Nixon lunch several hundred people gathered at the main entrance of the estate, with a few holding anti-American placards calling for peace in Vietnam. The guests dined on fillet of sole with lobster, smoked salmon, roast sirloin of beef and ice cream with mangoes, strawberries and peaches. Chequers and its 1,000 acre estate were bequeathed to the nation in 1917 by Sir Arthur Lee, an MP and director-general of food production.

The Prime Minister's grace and favour country retreat regularly hosts world leaders and celebrities, but the Queen has only been twice during her reign Mr Cameron made the invitation after coming across old photographs of the Queen visiting in 1970 with Tory PM Edward Heath (left) and US President Richard Nixon Lloyd George became its first prime ministerial occupant in 1921. The Queen has dined at Downing Street numerous times. In July 2012, she and the Duke of Edinburgh joined Mr Cameron, Mr Brown, Mr Blair and Sir John for a lunch to mark her Diamond Jubilee. Traditionally, the Queen invites the Prime Minister to make an annual visit to Balmoral, her private residence in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, each September. The English Administrative County of Buckinghamshire The English Administrative County of Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire Arms The Armorial Bearings (Arms) of the County of Buckinghamshire Adjust the Buckinghamshire map using controls or drag with mouse Map Centre Position: Lat , Long .

Map Zoom Level: - Icon Help (The external website above will open in a new window) Population and area summary of the County of Buckinghamshire The County of Buckinghamshire is located in The Midland Counties of England, it covers an administrative area of 1,565Km² and in 2001 was home to a population of 479,026 persons, that represents 0.97% of that of England and 0.01% of the population of the entire United Kingdom. More detailed information including visitor attractions and event venues in Buckinghamshire is available on this site by following the links below to the Boroughs and/or Districts or follow this link to select a different County . Boroughs/Districts of the County of Buckinghamshire Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas may be displayed here as they are locations are historically associated with this county/region. Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas are however self-governing and are no longer responsible to the County/Regional Administration.

Unitary Authorities Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Buckinghamshire BUCKINGHAMSHIRE in 1950 Prominent on the county arms of Buckinghamshire is a swan, and there is something about this bird - contemplative, enigmatic, withdrawn into itself yet masking hidden fires beneath its serene exterior - which gives a clue to the quality of the county and its slow evolution through the centuries, the peace and calm of its inhabitants, unruffled except at moments of unbearable strain, and then erupting into demonstrations of sturdy individualism surprising in their intensity and whole-heartedness. It is in fighting mood, indeed, that the swan is depicted on the county arms. Buckinghamshire is a small county, in some ways a backwater, yet the men and women who have lived there have affected English history to a degree disproportionate to their numbers. Let us take a look first at the corner of the earth in which they live. The shire of Buckingham was constituted during the ninth century after the expulsion of the Danes.

As might be expected in a part of England as wild as the Chilterns then were, the King's advisers had little detailed knowledge of their task, and the grouping of the hundreds in the county is entirely arbitrary, with little natural unity between different area. Buckinghamshire to-day is most conveniently to be thought of in four separate regions, each of which will require some detailed description before we can understand the psychology of the people. I do not wish to load this short chapter with population figures, rainfall statistics or geological details; but it is necessary to get a grip of the widely varying nature of the country and towns included thus arbitrarily in this county's boundaries, to the geographically for a moment, before we can arrive at a true picture of the people of Buckinghamshire against their home background.

Think first of the Thames valley - of the north bank from just west of Staines to just east of Henley , for this is the first section that concerns us; Colnbrook , Slough , Eton , Taplow and Marlow are the principal towns situated in the flat and fertile country whose closeness to London and excellent east-west communications have caused it to be increasingly urbanized, so that the area as a whole has lost, since the First World War, most of the character it once had. The people of Buckinghamshire nevertheless continue to feel proud of having pioneered in the 1920's at Slough the light industries trading-estate conception which is nowadays part of the normal development of nearly every large town in the country; the technical quality of the light-engineering industries of Slough being the highest in the world. I should not omit the development of the first film studios in this area. The charm of Denham village is still as yet unspoilt by the rise of a British Hollywood in its neighbourhood. I must mention also another distinction of this part of the country.

Just north of Slough stands all that is left of the ancient forest of Burnham , the remnants of which were bought by the corporation of the City of London in1879 and opened to the public. A journey to admire the vast boles and branches of the famous Burnham Beeches is a popular week-end pilgrimage for many Londers. Glory of Beechwoods Secondly, the Chilterrn s - the rolling chain of chalk escarpments crossing Buckinghamshire from south-west to north-east between Stokenchurch and Ivinghoe , "ridges" alternating with waterless "bottoms" and the whole falling away to the south and east down to the banks of the Thames and the Colne. This is mostly a dry, flinty country, ungrateful to the farmer, who nevertheless continues to farm it as best he can; but its particularly glory is its beechwoods, where the traditional craft of furniture-making is still widely carried on in many small county factories often by itinerant teams of "bodgers" (as chair-makers are called) working under the trees themselves.

High Wycombe - after Slough the second largest town in the county - is the centre of this district, which includes also Stokenchurch, Princes Risborough , Wendover , Beaconsfield , Chesham and Amersham . The boundaries of the three Chiltern hundreds (Stoke, Burnham and Desborough) have remained unaltered since Domesday, and the old office of Stewards of the Chiltern Hundreds - a post of some responsibility before the Chilterns were deforested and cleared of brigands - still exists as a token unpaid office which can be undertaken by Members of Parliament wishing to retire. In High Wycombe are the works in which British postage stamps aer printed; there are also a number of paper-mills, in one of which it is said that blotting-paper was first accidentally discovered, by the negligence of an employee who had omitted the size coating from a sheet of ordinary cartridge paper. Survivor of the Past Barely three miles along the Oxford Road from High Wycombe lies West Wycombe , a village that, in its way, is even more celebrated than its larger neighbour.

It is rightly acclaimed as one of the most picturesque survivals of an older and more gracious England , and it is a relief to all who know it, that the village is now taken over by the National Trust. Thirdly, there is the Vale of Aylesbury , from the point of view of agriculture the richest part of the county; it forms part of the gently undulating plain of North Buckinghamshire, and is one of the finest dairy and stock-rearing areas in the whole of England . This well-watered, clayey plain was formerly farmed by crop rotation to a far greater extent than now, as can be seen from the long ridges running across the fields resulting from a special ploughing technique designed to maintain drainage. The deserted manor of Creslow claims Creslow Great Field (three hundred acres) as the largest single pasture in Britain; here cattle have been fattened for the royal table since the times of Queen Elizabeth. Aylesbury - the county town - Buckingham and Winslow are the most notable places in the plain; all are market towns maintaining themselves, as they always have, by supplying the needs of the surrounding countryside, though Aylesbury ducklings are famous, though far fewer than formerly.

In the far north of the county, and belonging scenically more naturally to Bedfordshire next door, is the valley of the Ouse, which meanders casually across the county from Buckingham through Stony Stratford , Wolverton and Newport Pagnell to Olney - a quiet, un-dramatic countryside, best described in the poems of William Cowper, who lived there for thirty years. At the time of Domesday, when a large part of the Chilterns was still impenetrable forest, this Ouse valley was the most populous part of the county. It is a typical piece of middle England , famous in past centuries for it pillow lace, a cottage industry encouraged by Flemish immigrants at the end of the eighteenth century. To-day the area supports the L.M.S. railway carriage works, which make Wolverton the fourth largest urban district in the county. Here, then, within one county boundary, are four completely different regions. I cannot refrain from pointing out two further anomalies about the county which testify to the perverse, un-coordinated fashion in which it has evolved - being in this respect a microcosm of England herself.

Though the whole county lies within sixty miles of London , its population remains very low, at about two hundred and seventy-five thousand - a good deal smaller than that of the city of Hull . Secondly, many of the market towns on which the country life of Buckinghamshire depends are outside the county itself. Woburn , Leighton Buzzard , Dunstable , Tring , Berkhamstead , Rickmansworth , Uxbridge , Staines , Windsor , Maidenhead , Henley , Watlington , Thame , Bicester , Brackley and Towcester are all within five miles of the county boundary, but all outside the county. With such a diversity of landscape, climate and occupation, it will be difficult to find a typical Buckinghamshire man in the sense that you could find a typically Norfolk or Devon man. It is no longer true, as it would have been at the beginning of this century, to describe Buckinghamshire as primarily an agricultural county, living of the proceeds of her own land; since to-day the larger part of the county's income is earned, and the larger part of the population employed, in Slough , Aylesbury , High Wycombe or Wolverton , in factories and workshops ministering to a mechanical age.

There are also many recent immigrants to the county who use it merely as a dormitory-cum-weekend-residence, and work in London or elsewhere. Electrification of the railway between Aylesbury and London has brought more and more "commuters" to the valleys of the Chess and the Misbourne - families with homes in Buckinghamshire, but few roots there; in the county, but not of it. Fresher still in our minds is the number of shadow factories and evacuated industries which started in the county during the Second World War. Many of these will probably choose to stay there instead of moving back to their former sites. In order to get some idea of the genealogy of the local Buckinghamshire man as he was at the beginning of this century, before the newcomers began to arrive, it is helpful to look for the moment at the pre-history of the county. The earliest remains so far found within the county are Palaeolithic, and there is evidence that nearly all the races which successively invaded England from the continent - Celts, Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans - swept across Buckinghamshire and left traces of their presence.

Of those mentioned, Danes and Norman's left fewdt traces, the latter merely superimposing a new landed aristocracy on top of the old Saxon lords, with little effect on the life of the ordinary man in the county. The fair-haired Saxon type, then, is possibly the predominating type, if any type can be said to predominate at all; but we must add that this holds good for north Buckinghamshire only - in many places, especially in the Chilterns , you can distinguish dark Celtic survivals as well. In fact, it is more realistic to write down the men of the county - as, by and large, of England herself - as of mixed and indeterminable parentage - mongrels, if you like - than to look for a typical Buckinghamshire man. But though I cannot find a distinctive type, I can point out how the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire have throughout their written history collectively given repeated proof of a sturdy independence and a spirit of innovation and adventure un-expected in such placid surroundings, which makes Buckinghamshire more important in English history than some of its neighbouring counties.

The characteristic is sufficiently marked to be worth noting, even before we look at some of the famous men who as individuals have brought renown to the county. The lines in G.K. Chesterton's poem The Secret People "It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest God's scorn for all men governing . . . Speak well enough for the men of Buckinghamshire and their determination not to be put upon, particularly in religious maters. I like to believe that Magna Carta, the inalienable charter of all our civil liberties, was signed (June 15, 1215) by King John within the county boundaries, as it may well have been if, as many authorities hold, the document was executed on Charter Island, and not in the meadow of Runnymede , which, of course, is on the Surrey side of the river. Later, the Lollard movement, the earliest stirring of British religious nonconformity, instituted by John Wyclif in the fourteenth century, but even more influential after his death, was widely supported by the Buckinghamshire land-owners and their followers, many of whom were burnt at the stake for the cause.

Wyclif himself had held the living of Ludgershall in the county, though he worked mainly from Oxford ; but it must have been through the villages Buckinghamshire that his message of asceticism and strict adherence to the Christianity of the Bible first spread south-east towards London on the lips of his travelling friars. Civil War Battle In the struggles between the King and the people of England which led up to the Civil War, Buckinghamshire men were again to the fore on the Roundhead side, and it was a Buckinghamshire squire, John Hampden, of whom I shall say more later, who helped to ring matters to a head. In 1642 one of the first battles of the Civil War was a few miles north of Aylesbury ; here the Roundhead headquarters were first set up; Charles I's headquarters were later in Buckingham , and throughout the war the county was much fought over. In the seventeenth century George Fox, the Leicestershire shoemaker's apprentice, found in the county some of the earliest and most devoted members of his Society of Friends (nicknamed Quakers from Fox's stern injunction to an erring magistrate to "quake before the Lord").

Some of the oldest Quaker meeting-houses are in this county, including the world-famous house at Jordans, where the grave of William Peen, founder and "first proprietor" of the state of Pennsylvania, is much visited by Americans. The county can shoe many fine chapels, specimens of local builders' work - a genuine folk art which we may later come to admire as we admire the village churches of to-day. Of the later, too, the county has many fine examples. The Eccentric Period church of the Dashwood family at West Wycombe is celebrated. I mentioned John Hampden, and should like him to be thought of as the typical Buckinghamshire man, bred in the county on the proverbially excellent "Buckinghamshire bread and beef". He became squire of Great Hampden near Wendover in 1620 soon after his marriage. It was in respect of a property at Stoke Manderville , just south of Aylesbury , that in 1635 he endeared himself to countless Englishmen of his own and later generations by refusing to pay what he considered an unjustifiable imposition - twenty shillings of "ship money," an out-of-date defence levy which Charles I wished to revive and enforce.

He continued to play a leading part in all the disputes, legal and parliamentary, which followed, and after the start of the Civil War commanded a Buckinghamshire battalion of the Parliamentary army. Wounded at the battle of Chalgrove Field in 1643, he died at Thame and was brought home for burial to Hampden, where his family continued to live for many years. Next after Hampden must be mentioned the two poets of the county: William Cowper (1731 - 1800), whose association with Olney has already been mentioned, and Thomas Gray (1716 - 1761), who was educated at Eton , returned frequently in after life to his mother's house at Stoke Poges , and in the churchyard there wrote his famous Elegy, celebrating for all time the simplicity and the pathos of ordinary life in an English village.

Other poets - Milton (who wrote Lycidas and L'Allegro among the Thames-side meadows near Colnbrook ), Waller and Shelly - have had brief associations with the county, but Cowper and Gray must be accounted its principal men of letters, together with the eccentric Thomas Love Peacock, who wrote his best known satires, Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, at Marlow between 1815 and 1820, the latter being probably inspired by the gloomy bat-ridden fastness of nearby Medmenham Abbey. Distinguished Immigrants Apart from William Penn, whose claim to a Buckingham ancestry is doubtful, the county can claim few other natives of more than local distinction, though the roll of distinguished immigrants to the county who owned property there and refreshed themselves in its sleepy countryside for their work in London is a long one.

It includes Burke (1729 - 1797), who lived the last twenty years of his life at Gregories, near Beaconsfield ; Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield (1804 - 1881), whose father purchased the manor house at Bradenham which Disraeli describes in his novel Endymion, and who later moved to the neighbouring village of Hughenden , where he is buried; the historian Grote (1794 - 1871), who wrote most of his History of Greece near Farnham Royal; the two Herschels, Sir William (1738 - 1822) and his son Sir John (1792 - 1871), pioneers of astronomy - it was near Slough that the elder Herschel erected his revolutionary forty-foot reflecting telescope for the study of the stars, parts of which are still preserved to-day; W H Smith, the newsagent, crated first Viscount Hambleden; Lord Dawson of Penn, royal physician; and , since 1918, the successive Prime Ministers of the day, each of whom is enabled by the generosity of the late Lord Lee of

 Fareham to use as his private country house the mansion of Chequers, tucked away near Monks Risborough in one of the loveliest folds of the Chilterns.

Buckinghamshire can claim her influence, too, during the vital formative years of adolescence, on all the pupils of her famous public schools - Eton and Stowe for boys, and Wycombe Abbey for girls - and on the hundreds of Royal Air Force men who begin their service careers at Halton , near Wendover . I cannot leave this catalogue of Buckinghamshire characters without a tribute to one whom I should call the most enterprising of them all - Master John Shorne, saintly thirteenth century rector of North Marston near Winslow , who is said by his exceptional piety to have successfully imprisoned the Devil in a boot, out of which he would pop his head when required by the rector to do so. How long the Devil stayed there we are not told, but the incident gave rise to our modern toy the Jack-in-the-Box, and several inns in the neighbourhood are still called "The Boot." Such is our county, its physical appearance, its leading employments, its past history and its outstanding individuals - matters for the man born and bred in the county to contemplate with pride and affection.

The old order changeth, the fundamental unity of the county - for geographical reasons, as we saw, never very marked - has already been impaired, and will be still further impaired, by an ever-growing London just over the border. But those newcomers or part-time residents who settle in the county and abandon themselves to its charm will find just the same things to be proud of, and one day to love: good food and drink, an air of sober prosperity in towns, in the country a hundred secret beauty spots of their own discovery in addition to those already famous, fat cattle and land in good heart throughout the Vale of Aylesbury , the glory of winter sunsets seen from a ridge of the Chilterns, beechwoods golden in autumn and the tenderest of greens in the spring, and after dark the nightingale. [Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured not to display frames.] The books displayed above are returned using the search terms 'Buckinghamshire'. *If nothing is found relating to these terms Amazon will display a selection of books from the general Best Seller list.

Selected UK Retailers The English Historical County of Middlesex The English Historical County of Middlesex Middlesex Arms The Armorial Bearings (Arms) of the County of Middlesex Adjust the Middlesex map using controls or drag with mouse Map Centre Position: Lat , Long . Map Zoom Level: - Icon Help Population and area summary of the County of Middlesex The County of Middlesex is extinct and no longer exercises administrative power, its functions and responsibilities have been transferred or absorbed by new authorities. Boroughs/Districts of the County of Middlesex Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas may be displayed here as they are locations are historically associated with this county/region. Unitary Authorities and Metropolitan Areas are however self-governing and are no longer responsible to the County/Regional Administration. Cities Historical notes about The English Historical County of Middlesex MIDDLESEX in 1950 With the creation of the administrative County of London, Middlesex lost nearly all its wealth, its history and its interest. It still retains the shadow of its ancient possession of London by continuing its local government from the beautiful Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster.

But it has become, after Rutland, the smallest of the English counties in the area, and it has very little of the natural beauty that is still Surrey's despite suburbanization. It is certain that few Londoners know where London ends and Middlesex begins. On the south-east the county starts on the Thames just below Chiswick, and continues upwards to Staines, where the Colne flows into the Thames. The Colne is the county's boundary with Buckinghamshire, from Staines to Harefield. From there Middlesex borders Hertfordshire eastward by way of Pinner and Mill Hill, where the boundary makes a sharp switch north to South Mimms and then east again to the Lea, which divides Middlesex from Essex. Middlesex continues down the Lea to Stoke Newington. From there it touches London westward to Golders Green, and then southward along the borders of Hampstead, Paddington and Hammersmith to the Thames. Large and typically London districts have been left within the county, and hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of Tottenham, Willesden, Acton and Ealing would be surprised and possibly annoyed, if they were told they are not citizens of that anything but mean city.

Middlesex is London's poor relation. It has an area of 148,691 acres and a population of nearly tow millions, which means that almost the whole area of the county is taken up providing living and working space (for those who do not work in London) for it over-many inhabitants. Between the wars, the population increased by approximately eight hundred thousand, and in consequence the few remaining villages became completely urbanized. For example, Kenton, near Harrow, had a population of about two hundred in 1914. In 1938, its population was twenty five thousand. Greenford, east of Uxbridge, with a tiny church that can barely hold two hundred persons, has increased in population from one thousand to fifty thousand. There is practically no "real country," to use Beach Thomas's phrase, left in Middlesex except in the areas round Harefield in the north-west and round Stanwell farther south. The increase in population has been due to some extent to the general tendency of the Londoner to trek from the city for his home. Finchley, Hendon, Edgware, Harrow, Pinner and Ealing are residential suburbs, the refugees of the season-ticket holders.

But Middlesex has been industrialized more than suburbanized. Tottenham is a factory town. Acton is the home of London's laundries. Hanwell has motor works. Southall is a railway town with many factories. The railway at Hayes, which twenty years ago was bordered by an orchard, is now bordered by an ugly gramophone works. Even West Drayton, at the extreme west of the county, which until very recent years was still a country town, is an industrial centre. The consequence is that, unlike Surrey, Middlesex mainly owes its increased population to the growing local demand for labour, and this means that it has far smaller number of the leisured, the well-to-do and the retired. Hampsted Garden Suburb The most interesting of the well-to-do settlements in Middlesex is the Hampstead garden suburb in the Hendon area. The suburb has been enthusiastically described as "a delightful rural town of twenty thousand people." It has none of the cheap ugliness of the jerry-built dormitory towns that were allowed to disfigure the metropolitan outskirts after the First World War. Its houses and its churches were designed by distinguished architects.

It is comely and spacious, with gardens and lawns and avenues of trees, "trimmed like hat-boxes." But it is not a rural town or any other sort of the town; for a town is a place where men work as well as rest, and where man of many avocations mix and act together. In the perfect garden city the well-to-do are segregated in depressingly symmetrical prosperity. For all its superficial charm, the garden suburb is a warning for the planners. What is needed are community centres not class colonies. Exploring Middlesex west from Chiswick, the little village of Strand-on-the Green, at the foot of Kew Bridge, once a settlement of Thames fishermen, is interesting, since it has somehow contrived to keep its detached character. Up the river is Twickenham, where Pope lived in a villa, bought with the money that he received for his translation of Homer, where Horace Walpole lived on Strawberry Hill, where Fielding wrote Tom Jones and Dickens wrote Oliver Twist. From Twickenham and its neighbour Hampton the view of Richmond Hill across the river is perhaps the loveliest in Middlesex. Hampton Court is the county's chief historic possession.

Built by Cardinal Wolsey, who spent there his few years of ostentatious power, it became the favourite residence of Henry VIII, and the birthplace of Edward VI. Mary Tudor spent her honeymoon with the dreary-souled, plotting Philip of Spain at Hampton Court. Here Shakespeare acted before the Scottish Jamie. Dutch William commissioned Christopher Wren to add Fountain Court to the Tudor building. This is one of the very few good things that this country owes to the imported sovereign, who introduced the English people to gin and stabilized the power of money in the national economy by sponsoring the Bank of England. Hampton Court contains interesting pictures and matchless tapestries, with its maze fro the amusement of the general public, its great vine and its gorgeous herbaceous border which, backed by a Wren wall, is perhaps the most beautiful of all English flowerbeds. Still following the Thames, one remembers that Thomas Love Peacock, the novelist, Shelley's friend and executor and the father-in-law of George Meredith, lived at Shepperton, and Matthew Arnold was born and buried at Laleham. The broad Laleham Reach if the Thames at it Middlesex best.

The Romans built four of the main roads that run from London, west, north-west and north across Middlesex. The most southerly of the Roman roads passes by way of Chiswick, Brentford and Hounslow to cross the Thames of Staines. At Hounslow there is a loop which leads to Slough in Buckinghamshire to cross the river at Maidenhead. Brentford, with a hideous great gasometer and a mean and narrow High Street, was a ghastly traffic bottle-neck before the construction of the Great West Road. This road, one of the first by-passes, is lined by modern factories, many of which prove that a factory need not be an eyesore. Hounslow Heath, once famous for its highwaymen, is now market gardens and soap factories, Near Hounslow is Stanwell, which, as I have said, is one of Middlesex's two remaining villages. A second road runs through Willesden, Harrow and Pinner. Gladstone Park on Dollis Hill at Willesden has its name from the fact that the Liberal statesmen spent his quiet weekends as the guest of Lord Aberdeen at Dollis Hills House long before Chequers became the Prime Ministers' retreat.

Crowds of Londoners used to flock to watch Gladstone on a Sunday morning going to and from St Mary's Church, Neasden Lane, where he always read the lessons at Mattins whenever he was at Dollis Hill. This evidence of popularity, which seriously disturbed his devotions, caused Gladstone considerable annoyance. Mark Twain was another occasional visitor. Harrow is now a great suburban district which has absorbed a dozen villages, and has a population of two hundred thousand. But the view of Windsor and of the high ground of Surrey and Kent from the top of Harrow Hill, where the spire of St Mary's is four hundred feet above the sea, remains. The noble record of Harrow School is a great county possession, and the old town itself has kept a good deal of what has been called its "cloistered air." St Mary's was consecrated in 1094, and a small part of the Norman foundation remains.

Harrow School was founded in the reign of Elizabeth by John Lyon, a yeoman, who left lands to a corporation "for a free grammar school for the poor, for poor scholars at the universities, and the repairing highways." As has happened with many other of England's miscalled "public schools," the intention of the founder has been largely ignored, and Harrow has become famous as the school for the sons of the prosperous and the privileged. It has been the school of six of England's Prime Ministers - of Percival, Aberdeen, Robert Peel, whom Queen Victoria fist disliked and afterwards came to trust, of "Old Pam" (Lord Palmerston), whom she always detested, Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill; of Sheridan the dramatist and Shaftesbury the philanthropist, and of Manning, the great churchman, who was the ally of the London dockers when they struck in the eighties for "a tanner an hour," who is Harrow's one Cardinal. There are portraits and busts of its worthies in comely halls and rooms in the school. But Harrow is properly proudest of Byron, who wrote the earliest of his poems sitting on John Peachey's tombstone at St Mary's.

Byron lazy, lazily lay Hid from lessons and game away; Dreaming poetry all alone Up-in-top of the Peachy Stone. W. S. Gilbert lived and died at Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, a quarrelsome man, famous as the librettist of the Savoy operas and the writer of lyrics, as Maurice Baring contended, comparable to those of Herrick. The one most often in my mind, as I grow old, is:- Is life a boon? If so, it must befall That death, whene'er he call, Must call to soon! The Edgware Road from Hendon to Edgware, up the steep Brockley Hill to Stanmore, is the Roman Watling Street. There is a legend, almost certainly unfounded, that Handel was moved to write "The Harmonious Blacksmith" after sheltering from a storm in a forge at Edgware. The Prince Regent, the Tsar of Russia, the King of Prussia and Louis XVIII of France met to discuss the future of Europe at Bentley Priory at Stanmore when it was believed that Napoleon was safely tucked away in the island of Elba.

During the war Bentley was the headquarters of Fighter Command of the R.A.F. Highgate Hill, where Whittington turned again to be Lord Mayor of London, is the most famous of the northern heights. Here are buried in strange post-mortem neighbourliness Herbert Spencer, the philosopher of individualism, who might have married George Eliot had she been better looking, and Karl Marx, the philosopher of revolutionary Socialism. George Morland painted many of his pictures at the Bull Inn at Highgate, and at Highgate lived Leigh Hunt, whom Dickens lampooned in Bleak House. Shortly before their deaths, Coleridge, a man of nearly fifty, had his one meeting with Keats, then twenty-six, "a loose slack not well-dressed youth," at Highgate Hill, and nearly two hundred years before, two other poets, Milton and Andrew Marvell, often met there.

In the extreme east of the county, Enfield, one of the last places in England where there was a yearly fair for the engagement of farm servants, caters, to indicate their craft, coming with their whips, labourers with a spade and woodmen with a bill, and Edmonton, where John Gilpin finished his famous ride, are associated with Charles Lamb, "the most lovable Londoner of them all." He went to live in Enfield with his sister Mary, when he retired from the East India Office and became a superannuated man. He was visited by Leigh Hunt and Tom Hood, by Coleridge and Wordsworth. But the super-Cockney hated the country. He wrote to Wordsworth: "Let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest and occupation, interchange of converse and re-creative study can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable." In 1833 the Lambs moved to Edmonton, and there a year later the gentle Elia died. Middlesex, the mother of London, has come to be its unconsidered dependant. As a common with most poor relations, it has little character of its own.

No one dreams of saying of a man that he has distinctive Middlesex qualities, as we say that a man is "very Yorkshire." Middlesex has lost most of its wealth and most of its beauty. But, here and there in tucked-away corners, some of the beauty is still to be found, and the Little Home County has rich memories of great event for which it provided the scene, and of great men who lived and died within its borders. [Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured not to display frames.] The books displayed above are returned using the search terms 'Middlesex'. *If nothing is found relating to these terms Amazon will display a selection of books from the general Best Seller list. Selected UK Retailers

Question: In which English county can the Prime Minister's country house Chequers be found?
Answer: Buckinghamshire